Darwin FamilyPage

Once in a while,
right in the middle of an ordinary life,
love brings us a fairy tale.

It all began with a stained glass workshop at the Waterloo Farm Museum.
One look at those baby blues and I was a goner.

It took him almost 9 months to ask me to go fishing with him and about 2 seconds for me to say "sure"!

Afterward he cleaned fish and a bunch of his buddies stopped by to play pool,
so I gave him a peck on the cheek and said goodnight.

Then t was my turn to take him mushroom hunting.
We stalk the wily morels, and we found a bumper crop that morning.
(Check out Morel Madness sometime.)

I was living in a little cottage on a lake
and he was living in a barn that also served as his studio.
We were only a village away from each other.

LOVE WAS BLOOMING...

He built a beautiful Tiffany rosebush lamp for me as a wedding present the following year.
It hangs over the dining room table in the house we built a year after that.
Our wedding, in the village church, was all pink roses.

HOME SWEET HOME

Since we found each other a little later in life, we have no children.
We have a gazillion nieces and nephews (see "The Silly Story of the SolarCoasters")
and LOTS of animal friends.
These include dogs, cats, parrots, ducks, peafowl, chickens, geese, and guineas. dogbones

Cookie and Wrigley fishing in our pond
I always wanted a whole herd of Welsh corgis.

Cookie joined us in October 2003 and worked wonders healing my broken heart after my old corgi Nana died.

Another puppy, a cardigan corgi, came into our lives early in 2004. Wrigley is a great playmate for Cookie.

This photo I took of Cookie in 2004 in a bed of purple iris was published in the 2006 Fluffy Corgi calendar.

Buster, Cookie, Wrigley before Buster ("Buzz") died.

We once had seven, count 'em, 7 cats! But the lone survivor after all these years is George,
who came along with Fred in 1995, when their "mom" moved back to England.
George happens to ADORE Wrigley.

~ Buster used to guard the cat doors ~

* BIRD LIFE *

* Blue, Beard, and Rory *
Blue and Beard are blue-fronted Amazon parrots. Rory is an African grey.
Blue has lived with Bill since 1985 and Beard, his egg-mate,
lived with Bill's parents until the summer of 2002,
when he came to comfort Blue in the loss of his friend, Pearl, our Goffin's cockatoo.
(She's the one who picked him bald.)
Rory came for a visit in the summer of 2007 and just kind of stayed...These guys will probably outlive us!

* Ducks and Guineas *

* Peacocks and Bantams *

* Tooster and the Golden Comets * Golden Fluff *
chickbar

Always somebody coming or going....
Hazel

Hazel
This little banty hen spent most of the winter 2003 with us...I brought her inside to "die warm" when she became ill in January. Lots of heat, antibiotics, and love later, she survived, and thrived...watching the other birds outside! Since it would be too much of a shock to put her back into the freezing cold, we kept her inside for nearly three months. She sat on my lap at the computer, watched TV, and roosted on a towel on the back of the sofa. She returned to the outside world in the spring.

This was a cornfield twenty years ago...
Now I thank God for these views every day.

** My "Secret Gardens" **

* The Ponds *

** The Orchard and the Bird Pens **

"Winter, Spring,

Summer or Fall...

...all you've got to do is call, and I'll be there, yes, I will..."

The New Addition 2002 and 2004

These new rooms changed our lives!
flowerborder

* My best friend in the whole world * Hopefully we're going to live happily ever after...Thank you for visiting!

E-mail us if you like.

In Loving Memory

Buster taught me a lot about patience and trust. He was nearly blind and deaf his last year or two, but we got along just fine.
He passed from our world in April of 2008, fourteen years to the week from when we got him as a young pup.
I sure miss you, Buzz.

Just a month before that, we lost my favorite cat, Marble, who was 17.
His mom tried to get rid of him, the runt, by dragging him behind the clothes dryer. Twice.
Bill rescued him and he outlived all of his brothers.

Pearl, our beloved Goffin's cockatoo, who ate at the table, showered with Marsi,
screeched at our guests, and was the clown of the family,
died in January 2002 in a freak fall from the top of her cage.
She was 19. We miss her antics every day.

2003 was hard. At summer's end, my sweet old Nan, light of my life, finally gave up the ghost.
She is buried beneath our bedroom window, close to my side of the bed, where she slept for 17 years.

Nana Bear

Orion was a wolf dog who loved and challenged us for five years. He died in 1999 at the age of 7.
Smoky, our lovable 13 year old mutt, passed away in the fall of 2002.
All of these "kids" are at Rainbow Bridge now, hopefully romping together again.

I've loved dogs all my life. There's me with Cortez and Keri in 1977, and 30 years later with my corgis...

Bill had cats. I loved them, too.

Cloudy, Noches, Charcoal, Bandit and Marble were brothers, born in 1990.
Cloudy left us in the summer of 2002, Noches passed away in 2003, Charcoal in 2004, Bandit in 2006, and Marble in 2008 .

Sweet Fred, George's brother, died in 2005.
Rest in peace, boys.

~ Sweet dreams! ~

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